Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," getting answers from id on the topic, who express frustration with problems that were largely caused by driver issues. Along the way they also address how the game being designed for consoles holds back the PC edition. "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," John Carmack tells them. "We chose the latter." He also bluntly addresses why this makes sense for id (emphasis Kotaku's):

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."

You know which this game it feels like, Dakantania. Same amount of hype and top programmers and then when released is nothing more than a pile of shite. I'm just printing off my returns form and sending it back, I cant make it work, the drivers are shit and id haven't tested this at all.

I'm sick and tired of trying to make this game work, all the gfx are screwed from the beginning and id will never get my money again. Its like DNF, I think id have paried for a few yrs..

I fell through the map. It seems that high rez textures are in there somewhere. Here is a comparison of the air ship ride during and after. I rode the air ship to Subwaytown, got off and then the textures go to poo.

I was playing through the mutant sewer/hospital, easily the most iconic portion of the game's advertising, and some of the internal corridor areas have terrible geometry and texturing - stuff that is worse than what Doom 3 had back in the day.

In the same area, the game actually has a portion where you need to power an electric lock to a gate that is blocking an escalator - an escalator that has only a 2-3 foot high barrier on the side. Of course, with the main character acting like his lower appendages have been amputated, this is a challenge.

Likewise, the boss in the area has a completely exposed brain. You can shoot endlessly into its open, exposed gray matter and nothing happens. However, shoot a rocket at the same area - a rocket that has such a small explosion area that it will not hurt you while you are standing just a few feet away - and you take off a third of the boss' health.

The game is not entirely like this, but it gives you an impression of how utterly confused and backward it can be at times.You could think id would know how important a consistent art style is.Wondering how many times I will be forced to play through the same levels,Ray

With all due respect, the game's setpieces don't really start to come until about 3-4 hours in. The better ones are actually in the second hub, which clearly shows that id was more comfortable with the tools as the game was maturing.

I posted some of the items I found impressive in the patch thread. While I agree that some of the "invisible walls" are frustrating, after you get beyond that there's some amazing work in there.

I'm in no way disagreeing that the game had birthing issues, but I can see that once they iron out there's going to be some cool stuff that can be done with it.

The characters look amazing but don't have any depth to them. The gameplay itself actually feels very dated, from the invisible walls to the doors you cannot open to environments that have very little interactivity to enemies that drop weapons you cannot pickup. And some decisions are just inconsistent - for instance, you cannot jump over railings because of invisible walls and yet if you overstep a platform on the rope-slide you fall to instant death.

RAGE is anything but innovative. It copies games like Borderlands but does a half-assed job. The texturing is the biggest addition, but they butchered the quality by compressing it "down" to 25GB, leaving low resolution textures everywhere. And the pre-baked lighting is actually a backward step from even Doom 3, especially from games like Far Cry 2 - it's easy to get good performance if you pre-calculate virtually all the lighting.

^Drag0n^ wrote on Oct 9, 2011, 23:26:The really sad part about all this? With whomever fault lays blame with, the elements of the game that are actually quite unique and would be getting the press are all lost in the controversy surrounding a problem that will probably be fixed in a week or two, long after the attention span of the press has moved on to other things.

Bummer.

I've played it for an hour, which I deem long enough to be able to judge this game on its uniqueness. What I found unique were the details put into the NPCs. That's where the uniqueness starts and ends.

I sincerely hope id Software gets burried because of this clusterfuck. And while its in its grave, I want it to turn around as it curses itself for not respecting the PC platform like CDProjekt does -- a developer that's quite alive.

The really sad part about all this? With whomever fault lays blame with, the elements of the game that are actually quite unique and would be getting the press are all lost in the controversy surrounding a problem that will probably be fixed in a week or two, long after the attention span of the press has moved on to other things.

I don't know if it has been mentioned but at QuakeCon 2011 Carmack stated that the textures had been compressed to optimise for 720p - the result being that on higher resolution displays, like the multi-megapixel resolutions available on PC - would suffer. He talked about wanting to do a dual-layer Blu-ray release for PS3 but not wanting to take the risk with the release approaching, and warned that the 256MB RAM of the PS3 would likely have been an issue. He also mentioned that he wanted to do a DLC release with a level that has the full textures.

So basically, the textures are crippled due to design concessions made for consoles. It's not because systems can't run them - it's because they couldn't spare the disk space (something that isn't an issue with digital distribution).

yuastnav wrote on Oct 9, 2011, 12:22:id is quite a tech-savvy company (or at least was) so it's surprising.

I haven't played, but I'd guess the problem is two-fold:1) id has zero experience in developer for the console and porting to the PC. This leads to a poorly made port. This is a brand new idea to them2) Carmack is a perfectionist and very curious. He repeatedly said that he enjoyed programming for consoles because you can really, really get to the hardware in ways not possible on the PC. So he coded Rage very specifically for the two sets of hardware consoles offer.

These kind of lead to each other. The fact that Rage seems so closely and deeply tied to consoles in a way that other developers don't seem to have reached just made the port harder.From what I understand this is probably the best looking game on consoles by quite a bit (I have not seen it nor looked into this, just what I've heard.) So Carmack really pushed them far. But he left PCs way back behind. Porting something so closely tied to consoles to PCs means ripping an enormous amount of it apart.

^Drag0n^ wrote on Oct 9, 2011, 12:22:I wouldn't go that far...Bethesda STILL has broken quests in FO3 and FO:NV, something which appears to be far more difficult to address than a adding a graphics tweaks menu/configuration file, and getting NV/AMD to clean up their shitty release process....

From a naive point of view I would imagine that fixing quests is easier than tinkering with the fundamental basis of the game e.g. the engine.

^Drag0n^ wrote on Oct 9, 2011, 12:22:I wouldn't go that far...Bethesda STILL has broken quests in FO3 and FO:NV, something which appears to be far more difficult to address than a adding a graphics tweaks menu/configuration file, and getting NV/AMD to clean up their shitty release process....

From a naive point of view I would imagine that fixing quests is easier than tinkering with the fundamental basis of the game e.g. the engine.

I wouldn't go that far...Bethesda STILL has broken quests in FO3 and FO:NV, something which appears to be far more difficult to address than a adding a graphics tweaks menu/configuration file, and getting NV/AMD to clean up their shitty release process....